I kept a diary of wounds,
inked each bruise in first-person singular,
margins crowded with the chemistry of blame.

The pages wore my fingerprints like frost— a crystal testament: I was wronged. 

I read it aloud nightly,
lullaby of the left-behind,
until the throat that sang it
grew a second throat that asked:
what if the story thirsts for footnotes? 

Then came the aftershock:
a midnight crack in the bedroom wall,
light pouring through plaster
like a prosecutor’s torch.

I saw the dust I had mistaken for atmosphere—
whole paragraphs I’d deleted
to keep the plot from folding back on itself. 
In the debris I found my exiled sentences—
trembling, naked from the cutting-room floor:

I was the one who stopped rowing first.
I stepped out of the boat while you were still bailing.
I closed the door quietly—no papers, no judge—
just the soft click of thirteen years of separate breathing. 

We never signed the ending—
only let it drift,
a raft unmoored,
each of us peering through fog
to see if the other had drowned yet. 

Years later the headlines arrive:
mug-shot glow, counts, dates,
a stranger wearing your face.
The state still calls us married;
the darkness is handwriting entirely yours—
a trajectory you alone chose,
long after I was gone.

Still, the heart bruises itself on echoes;
I mourn the city we once evacuated,
smoke staining a sky we both once lived under. 

Yet love never filed the papers either—
it stayed in the boat
after I stopped rowing,
after you stopped bailing,
both of us bent over our separate wounds
like men praying to different gods
inside the same storm. 

Tonight I whisper across the years
the sentence we could not speak then:

I see you.

Not the charges, not the spiral,
but the man who once walked me home in the rain
sharing one umbrella, both sleeves soaked. 

The love is a lantern left on the raft—
glass cracked, flame stubborn—
casting one small ring of light
that does not ask who jumped first,
only illuminates the water
where both of us almost drowned.

Open the window,
let the sadness drift out like smoke
from a candle finally snuffed.
What remains is quiet,
unburned,
still legally ours,
still tragically alive:
a love that survived
the story we miswrote,
waiting for the day
you lift your eyes from the dark page
and see the lantern
I never took back.